Sunday, January 29, 2017

The More Everything Changes, The More Everything Stays The Same

If everything I did this week worked out, you should notice nothing different between this week's build and the previous build...

That's because this week I tackled upgrading to Unity 5.5, which broke some things, and exposed some existing problems with some other things.

For starters, I use a convex mesh collider for the player object in this game. Without using the new "Inflate Mesh" setting on the mesh collider component, physics would do some very odd things which make some levels consistently difficult to complete. Charges would go sideways, player objects would get stuck in walls, etc.

Once I found that setting, those problems were solved, but new problems arose. Boost plates, which have always quickly parented the player to them and then un-parented the player, no longer consistently worked. You're not supposed to parent a moving non-kinemtatic rigidbody to something else anyway, so I was surprised that this worked the first time around. I had actually completely forgotten that I was doing this. Now boost plates just set your position to their position whenever you enter them - which is not the best way to do it, but it will work for now.

Other than that, I fiddled with changing how the player charges. You know, just because I hadn't messed with enough core features of the game for one week. I didn't end up liking any of my changes, but they gave me an idea for how to tweak the strength of the current charge system.

Charging-up noise is by Javier Zumer. Usage and modification under this license.